Contents

Early
years

Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and
his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England.[3] James
had emigrated from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a little
flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at Spring Grove (now
Brightwater), near
Nelson, New Zealand. His first name
was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was
registered.[4]

During the investigation of radioactivity he
coined the terms alpha and beta in 1899 to describe
the two distinct types of radiation emitted by
thorium and uranium. These rays were
differentiated on the basis of penetrating power.

Middle
years

In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to the chair of physics at McGill
University in Montreal, Canada, where he did the work that
gained him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
1908. In 1900 he gained a DSc from the University of New Zealand, and
from 1900 to 1903 he was joined at McGill by the young Frederick Soddy
(Nobel Prize in Chemistry,
1921) and they collaborated on research into the transmutation of elements.
Rutherford had demonstrated that radioactivity was the
spontaneous disintegration of atoms. He noticed that a sample of radioactive
material invariably took the same amount of time for half the
sample to decay—its "half-life"—and created a practical
application using this constant rate of decay as a clock, which could then be used to help determine
the age of the Earth, which
turned out to be much older than most of the scientists at the time
believed.

In 1900 he married Mary Georgina Newton (1876–1945); they had
one daughter, Eileen Mary (1901–1930), who married Ralph
Fowler.

In 1903, Rutherford realized that a type of radiation from radium discovered (but not named)
by French chemist Paul Villard in 1900, must represent
something different from alpha rays and beta rays, due to its very
much greater penetrating power. Rutherford gave this third type of
radiation its name also: the gamma ray.

Later
years

He was knighted in 1914. In 1916 he was
awarded the Hector Memorial Medal. In 1919 he
returned to the Cavendish as Director. Under him, Nobel Prizes were
awarded to Chadwick for discovering the neutron (in
1932), Cockcroft and Walton for an experiment which was to be
known as splitting the atom using a particle
accelerator, and Appleton for demonstrating the
existence of the ionosphere. He was admitted to the Order of
Merit in 1925 and in 1931 was created Baron Rutherford
of Nelson, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridge, a
title that became extinct upon his unexpected death in hospital
following an operation for an umbilical hernia (1937). Since he was
a peer, British protocol at that time required that he be operated
on by a titled doctor, and the delay cost him his life.[6] He is
interred in Westminster Abbey, alongside J. J. Thomson, and
near Sir Isaac Newton.

On the side of the Mond Laboratory on the site of the original
Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge,
there is an engraving in Rutherford's memory in the form of a
crocodile, this being the nickname given to him by its
commissioner, his colleague Peter Kapitza. The
initials of the engraver, Eric Gill, are visible within the mouth.

Sourced

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the
"social sciences" is: some do, some don't

Radioactivity is shown to be accompanied by chemical changes in
which new types of matter are being continually produced. ... The
conclusion is drawn that these chemical changes must be sub-atomic
in character.

"The Cause and Nature of Radioactivity" in Philosophical
Magazine (September 1902)

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

As quoted in Rutherford at Manchester (1962) by J. B.
Birks

Unsourced variant: That which is not measurable is not science.
That which is not physics is stamp collecting.

"Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp
collecting." (Unsourced)

"That which is not measurable is not science." is also
attributed to Lord Kelvin

I came into the room which was half-dark and presently spotted
Lord Kelvin
in the audience, and realised that I was in for trouble at the last
part of my speech dealing with the age of the Earth, where my views
conflicted with his.
To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the
important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and cock a
baleful glance at me.
Then a sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited
the age of the Earth, provided no new source [of heat] was
discovered. That prophetic utterance referred to what we are now
considering tonight, radium! Behold! The old boy beamed upon me.

Rutherford was one of the first researchers in nuclearphysics, after the discovery of radiation by a French physicist by the name of Antoine Henri Becquerel in 1896. Rutherford discovered the three parts of radiation which he named Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Rutherford also discovered that alpha particles were helium nuclei. Rutherford's study led to what we know today about the atomic structure, where the atom is a nucleus and electrons orbit around it.

Rutherford was the leader of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. He proved the existence of the nucleus and that is was composed of protons and neutrons. In 1932 James Chadwick made an experiment at the Cavendish Lab that showed Rutherford was right.